


nothing long of time

by taizi



Series: full circle [7]
Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-21 06:51:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11938632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taizi/pseuds/taizi
Summary: “If you guys want people to believe you about yokai stuff, why don’t you just get this weird cat to talk in front of them? It’d convince me.”Tanuma blinks. “I guess… I never thought about it?”





	1. Chapter 1

Satoru is experiencing the strangest sense of deja vu as he listens to Natsume’s ugly cat complain about all the trouble it’s going through. He’s heard this grumpy old man’s voice before, he thinks. He remembers hearing Natsume talk to it once, a long time ago.

“It’s always you that seems to find trouble, brat,” the cat says without any real heat, jumping from Tanuma’s lap to cross the floor to where Satoru is sitting. It puts its paws on his knee and lifts up to get a better look at him, staring without blinking through narrowed green-black eyes. “There’s definitely a cloud of _something_ nasty hanging over you. Let me see the curse mark.”

Satoru slides his sleeve up out of the way and offers his arm. He’s too surprised to do much more than obey, and throws Taki a bewildered look over Nyanko-sensei’s round head. She smiles encouragement at him, and even does a really good job of not looking worried.

Next to him, sounding as dumbfounded as Satoru feels, Kitamoto says, “If you guys want people to believe you about yokai stuff, why don’t you just get this weird cat to talk in front of them? It’d convince me.”

Tanuma blinks. “I guess… I never thought about it?”

A symbol lights up Nyanko’s head, a strangely squiggly character that Satoru doesn’t have a chance to study before it beams a blinding white that fills the room. When it fades, everyone in the room has flash blindness but Taki, who was the only one sensible enough to cover her eyes.

Blinking through sunspots, Satoru watches Nyanko pull away from the mottled bruising on his arm with distaste.

“It’s not something my light can break,” it says. Kitamoto stiffens, and Taki and Tanuma both look grave and frightened by the news, but Satoru isn’t overly surprised. In his experience, it’s _never_ this easy. “Does it seem to wax and wane? Get worse and then better intermittently?”

“Yeah,” Satoru replies. It’s remarkable how quickly he’s getting used to having a human conversation with the same lazy housecat he’s snuck table scraps to, and carried around in the summer heat. “Earlier this morning it was almost gone.”

“Then it’s probably psychosomatic,” Nyanko says. “How you’re feeling affects the curse. What have your moods been like?”

Satoru blinks rapidly. That’s a big question to unpack. Uncertainly he says, “Normal, I guess? I’ve been a little stressed lately, but -- “

“He’s been acting different,” Kitamoto says right over him. His hands are folded into tight fists. “Guarded. _Overshadowed_ , almost. I thought it was just the weight of this secret he’s been keeping, but maybe there’s a little more to it than that.”

“And he acts as though we’re strangers to him sometimes,” Taki puts in quietly. “Especially the other day, when we tried to get close to his arm. He looked at us as though he didn’t know who we were.”

“I didn’t,” Satoru starts, heart racing. “I wouldn’t -- “

“You didn’t _mean_ to,” Taki says quickly, leaning towards him. “We know you didn’t mean to. You don’t realize it, Nishimura, but the rest of us do, because we can _see_ you acting strangely.”

“Maybe it’s the yokai.” Tanuma’s contribution is abrupt, as though the revelation just occurred to him. “The books Taki found in her grandfather’s library made us think this might be a type of sympathetic magic, the yokai that cursed him affecting him from afar. Could it be the reason Nishimura’s been acting oddly lately? Maybe it’s psychosomatic and sympathetic at the same time.”

“So the yokai is affecting Nishimura’s mind, and Nishimura’s mind is affecting his body?” Kitamoto says slowly, in the tone of someone taking apart a horror story word by word.

“That sounds feasible,” Nyanko says at length, and as one, everyone else in the room turns to look at Satoru with varying degrees of pity in their eyes.

Satoru stands up, and it feels like he’s moving through fog or water. “I’ll be right back,” he tells the room at large, but even his own voice is muffled in his ears, and if any of his friends reply he doesn’t hear them.

He makes his way down the hall of Taki's huge house, and he’s glad he finds the bathroom on his first try because he’s sick almost as soon as he’s in front of the toilet. He throws up until his stomach is cramping and all that’s left in his body is dry heaves and a headache.

He doesn’t look at his arm. It hurts so badly he knows what it must look like.

A cool hand settles on his forehead, pushing sweaty fringe out of his eyes and lifting his face from its awkward cradle against his arm. It’s Kitamoto, sitting on the lid of the toilet and shifting Satoru’s head to rest against his knee instead. He doesn’t take the hand out of Satoru’s hair, continues smoothing it back in a gesture that’s as familiar to him as Kitamoto’s bedroom, and his mother’s homemade dinners.

“I understand why you didn’t tell me,” Kitamoto says softly. “Taki and Tanuma were talking to the cat when I left after you. They think the yokai behind the curse on your arm is making you feel -- isolated. It’s the reason you’ve been doing so much by yourself, acting like there’s no one around to help you. It makes sense now. I’m not angry with you, okay?”

Pressing his mouth into a firm line for as long as it takes to fight tears and win, Satoru just sits there and leans against him for what could have been a minute or an hour. When he thinks he can talk without crying, he says, “At first I really _was_ trying to handle it by myself, though. I don’t know -- when it changed -- “

He’s been acting differently, and he didn’t know. Overshadowed, his friends said in worried voices, guarded. _Unfamiliar._

And he didn’t even _realize,_ and that’s the scariest thing. What if the people who loved him were any less nosey, and this curse managed to turn him into a different person right under their noses? What if he lost to it, and no one knew how to help him? What if there was no one left to try, because he pushed them all away?

“It’s Natsume’s secret, isn’t it?” Kitamoto says into the quiet. “The one you’ve been keeping.”

Satoru feels too hollowed and hunted to do more than close his eyes and nod. On top of everything else, this is a personal failure he’s seen coming, to the point that it almost feels anticlimactic now. He couldn’t keep it from Kitamoto forever, he doesn’t know why he even tried.

“It makes sense. Later, when I have time to think about it, I’m sure it will make even _more_ sense. I just wish -- one of you had said something. I wish you didn’t feel like it had to be a secret in the first place. You could have trusted us with it from the beginning.”

“It’s not about _that,_ ” Satoru says plaintively, “it’s the _principle._ Natsume -- he’s always -- he’s never had people like us. Like you and me, and Taki and Tanuma, and the Fujiwaras. _I_ know, and _you_ know, that we all would’ve believed him if he told us -- I mean, you believed _me_ without asking for proof, and you’d believe him, too. _We_ know that, but Natsume _can’t_ yet. And then I found out, by stupid accident, and he asked me not to tell. So I -- wanted to keep this secret for him.” It sounds childish and lame, and Satoru is abruptly glad Kitamoto can’t see more of him than his profile, because he feels so stupid. “I wanted to prove that it was different here. Maybe if I kept his secret, he’d come a little closer to -- trusting. In us, and this place. Maybe he’d feel more at home here, if he _knew_ he could count on me.”

But I ruined it, he thinks, and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. It’s all a mess now.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admits, and his voice comes out thick and wobbly. He’s always been quick to cry, and his eyes feel hot behind his hands. “I can’t take any of it back, and I almost wish I could. I’m so _tired_ , Acchan.”

Kitamoto shifts, dislodging Satoru to sink to the floor beside him and wrap an arm around his shoulders instead. Maybe it should be at least a little awkward, but it’s the closest to safe Satoru has felt in a long time.

“We’ll figure it out,” Kitamoto says, so firmly his words might have moved mountains if he let them. “We’re not gonna let that monster get its hands on you again.”

The thing is, Satoru isn’t Natsume. As close as he might come to understanding the way Natsume thinks and the way he experiences the world, they're never going to be the same. Satoru grew up with a mother that didn’t have time for him, and a brother that grew out of him, and a best friend who took both their places as easily as breathing. Kitamoto walked home with Satoru after school and poured over their homework together and made him feel better when he was lonely or hurting or sad, and when Kitamoto says everything will be okay, Satoru believes him.

And there's very little a curse can do in face of something like that. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title borrowed from [pay no mind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC_Ya4cY8RQ) by madeon
> 
> will satoru find a cure?? will natsume ever find out about these shenanigans?? is this series ultimately going to end in kitanishi?? what food was nyanko bribed with to make this meeting?? tune in next time to find out ~~maybe~~


	2. Chapter 2

The whole thing comes to an end as quickly as it started in the first place.

Satoru and Kitamoto sit there for what feels like hours, until Tanuma finally comes to find them, and Satoru feels _aged_ when he climbs through pins and needles back up to his feet.

Tanuma is watching him warily, hovering as though he's afraid Satoru is going to faint off his feet or make a run for it, and Satoru trades a long-suffering look with Kitamoto as he allows himself to be shuffled back into the sitting room.

Before they can go in, Tanuma stops him with a hand on his arm just outside the door.

“Um,” he says eloquently, followed by, “I promise we didn’t call him over here.”

“Call who?” Kitamoto asks, but Satoru can guess. He’s flat out of surprise for the day, and shakes his head as he steps around Tanuma, tiredly resigned to another uncomfortable confrontation where he hadn’t wanted any in the first place. 

“Hi, Nishimura,” Natsume greets him with a smile.

There's fresh tea waiting and a place at the table set for Natsume, who sits on a comfortable cushion with Nyanko on his lap. Taki is in the middle of cutting into a strawberry shortcake, and looks as though she’s going to hold this situation together by sheer force if she has to.

“Nyanko-sensei left while Touko was making lunch,” Natsume says without heat, idly scratching his cat behind the ears. “It makes me nervous when he acts shifty, and some friends said they saw him heading this way, so I decided to come see what he was up to. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

He doesn’t sound hurt at what anyone else would probably have perceived as intentional exclusion. He also doesn’t look uncertain of his welcome, sure in an unremarkable way of his place in their lives and Taki’s bright home -- which is the most marked change of the person he was when he first moved here, and the person he is now.

Satoru isn’t sure what to do. Taki decides for him.

"Before you say anything," Taki says primly, "it's not because I feel bad for you, it's because I want you to feel better and cake _always_ makes you feel better. Come sit.”

He’s too wrung out to feel anything but touched, and sinks back onto his cushion and accepts the plate she hands over. His stomach is still in knots, so he contents himself with picking pieces of strawberry out of the middle while his friends settle in around him.

“So,” Taki says lightly, “what should we -- “

“Natsume, I told Kitamoto,” Satoru blurts before he can think better of it or talk himself down. As soon as he gets the words out his shoulders hunch defensively up by his ears, like his subconscious is expecting a blow. “Sorry.”

There’s a beat of silence, in which Satoru is too cowardly to look at anyone. Then a slender hand crosses his line of vision and Natsume’s fingers are folded over his own.

“Start from the beginning,” Natsume says gently. He’s probably worried. Satoru feels bad about that, and keeps his eyes glued to the deconstructed cake in front of him, talking more to it than anyone else.

“I kept the circle. Taki and Tanuma found out, and I told Kitamoto. I’m really sorry.”

Now that it’s out, he wants it _all_ out. He’s ripping the bandaid off, because he has always lacked grace and subtlety and anything else that could have made this conversation any easier.

“What?” Natsume’s voice is mildly horrified, at best. “You found that yokai circle _months_ ago! You’ve been using it all this time? That’s not the kind of thing you should mess with, you have no idea what it could have been doing to you all this time!”

He’s not _loud_ \-- Satoru has never heard Natsume get loud -- but he’s emphatic enough that it might as well be yelling anyway. He stares more resolutely at his plate, dread pouring out of his heart like a sieve.

Natsume is _right_ to get mad. Satoru messed up, _big_ time. There’s no reason to feel like he’s about to cry, or for Kitamoto to bristle defensively and say, “He was just trying to help!”

“No, I’m -- _hey_ , Nishimura.“

Natsume is moving -- dumping Nyanko off his lap unceremoniously and moving around the side of the table. His hand around Satoru’s is squeezing tighter and tugging him around, until finally Satoru has nowhere to look but into Natsume’s wide amber eyes.

And Natsume has no idea how to do this. He’s more comfortable here, with them and this place, than he’s ever been with anyone else, anywhere else -- but he’s never been in this position before. Natsume doesn’t know what he’s doing, as he tries to make his friend feel better, but he’s doing a good job regardless. Satoru thinks that is _so_ unfair.

“I’m not _angry_ at you, you idiot, I just -- I had no _idea_.” He hesitates for barely a moment, and then looks over Satoru’s shoulder at Kitamoto behind him. “I -- the only person I’ve told is Tanuma, everyone else just happened to -- “

Kitamoto dismisses that beginning of an apology before Natsume can get warmed up to it with a wave of his hand. “It’s fine, this isn’t about that.”

“What I mean is, I would have told you,” Natsume goes on doggedly. “Maybe not at first, but -- I trust you. You’re one of the first, best friends I’ve ever had. But it was a conversation I didn’t know how to start.”

And Kitamoto softens at that, the way anyone who really knows him could have guessed he would. “I get it, Natsume. It’s really fine.”

Natsume is somehow too preoccupied to spare much thought the revelation that his only remaining friend _also_ knows his most heavily guarded secret. He turns right back to Satoru and says, “You just have to be _careful,_ Nishimura. We don’t know what yokai magic like this could be doing to you long-term. You’re so sensitive to these things now, you have been ever since you were possessed.”

“I was _what?”_ Satoru finds the breath to squawk. The rest of the room parrots him a second later, Kitamoto going so far as to throw his hands up.

“He was _what?”_

“A few weeks after I first transferred here,” Natsume says. “Something was hunting me, and it followed me to Nishimura’s house. It latched onto him after that, and hung around for days.”

He’s either unaware of the horror in his friends’ expressions or he’s ignoring it with a poker face that belongs in a hall of fame, because he just keeps talking.

“Sensei had to banish it for us. That day I carried you to the hospital, do you remember?”

How could he forget? But Taki says, “I don’t!” and Tanuma puts his face in his hands. Kitamoto looks two shades paler than he was a few minutes ago. Satoru takes pity on all of them and moves the conversation along.

“I remember. I never got the chance to apologize for that -- for what I said -- “

“I think we just established it wasn’t you who said it,” Natsume teases gently, and gives Satoru’s hands another squeeze to take the nonexistent sting out of the quip, before letting go and sitting back on his heels. “But like I said, that sort of thing leaves a footprint behind. You need to be careful. Tanuma is overly sensitive to yokai, too -- he gets migraines.”

He’s something different as he talks about this. A creature of quiet confidence, sharing a wealth of expertise about a subject no one else could possibly know as intimately as him. In a room of people who like him, who believe him, he sits a little taller than he normally does.

Noisily helping himself to Natsume’s abandoned slice of shortcake, Nyanko adds, “Most humans can sense a yokai, even if they can’t see it. Especially in rural towns like this, that lie so close to yokai dwellings. Why else do you brats think your parents are so superstitious?”

“That makes more sense than it doesn’t,” Taki says fairly. “And it also might explain why that yokai is following Nishimura around now.”

Natsume’s eyes sharpen, his body going taunt. “There’s a yokai following you?”

“He tried to walk it home a few days ago,” Tanuma explains, so tonelessly that it’s obvious he’s forcibly suppressing the impolite urge to add, “the _moron_.” “Since then he’s been seeing it everywhere.”

“That’s why he told Kitamoto,” Taki adds, apparently just for the sake of a well-rounded conversation. “It chased them both to Nishimura’s house.”

Satoru watches Natsume go through something that looks painful. Before self-recrimination can stubbornly take root, Satoru tells him firmly, “It had nothing to do with you, Natsume, so don’t start. I just made a bad call.”

“A bad call,” Tanuma echoes faintly.

“I thought it needed _help!_ It looked nervous around all the people -- I didn’t know it was secretly a _monster_. It’s almost like it switched places with an evil twin there at the end.”

Nyanko sits up and tips his head to one side fractionally, interest piqued. The frosting on his whiskers does a little to detract from the visage. “Like there were two of them? Did you ever take your eyes off of it?”

“No, I -- well,” Satoru falters. “I was clearing a path for it through the crowd. It walked behind me most of the way. I think my eyes were off of it _most_ of the time, actually." His friends are staring at him, incredulous, and Satoru feels a flush creep up his face. "It was creepy! I didn't want to look at it!”

"But you wanted to walk it  _home."_ Kitamoto shakes his head, looking at Satoru with a complicated combination of exasperation, concern and reluctant amusement. “Nyanko was right. It’s _always_ you that finds trouble, Nishimura.”

"His trouble is our trouble," Natsume replies with no small conviction, and looks at Satoru with eyes that burn gold in the afternoon sunlight. "Thank you," he goes on, nonsensically, "for doing everything you did for me. Now let me do this for you." 

"Let _us_ ," Taki corrects gently. Natsume only smiles. 

"Let us," he agrees, and reaches for Satoru's hand again, holding tight -- as though to impress, in a kinder way than possessions and curse marks, that he won't be letting go easily.


End file.
